And so we got to the USA, yay, flight was long but not too bad, we got on the plane at 9am local time and arrived JFK at 4pm NY time. Of course the total duration was about 13h but didn’t seem so long.
The first impression of NYC wasn’t great. Massive traffic, old, un-maintained roads, dirty, loud, constant honking. That’s how our way from airport to east village looked like. We took uber pool which all in all was quite a good option as we paid only 35$ and had a chance to chat with some locals about wine and food.
After we got to the apartment we haven’t seen much as we were quite tried, so only went out to grab a quick dinner (ramen) and at 9pm we were in bed.
One of the first things I was surprised by were fire escapes on the buildings. It’s not I haven’t seen them in the movies, but I wasn’t aware how prevalent they are on the older buildings.
The jet lag didn’t really kick in and we woke up at 6-7am. We decided to walk up north from the apartment. First thing of course was to get something to eat, from all the options we got into a typical USA style diner where you can get toasts, pancakes with eggs, bacon and unlimited coffee refills, etc. Although instead of ladies waiters they were old men, I’m crossing it off from the things-to-experience-in-the-USA list.
On our way to Central Park we hit the times square and Broadway.
The Times square looks like any page without the adblocker. Shiny, blinky with shit tone of adds. But on its own way it’s pretty cool. I’m glad we’ve seen it early so it wasn’t packed with people.
Before getting into Central Park we rent citybikes as we wanted to cycle through the whole park. It was a great idea, as we used those bikes as our main way of transportation.
Central park is HUGE!
On our way back from CP we took Hudson bike path and went down to see Casey Neistat Office. Unfortunately we didn’t see him :/
We cycled to the Lower Manhattan to check out the statue of the liberty and chill out for a few minutes and we head back to our apartment. As it was around 4-5 pm we encountered some traffic so we were dancing between cars, which was quite exciting tbh!
And finally in the evening we went to see our first Broadway musical - The Groundhog day. The show was absolutely awesome and we can recommend it to any musical lovers :-)
Just to make our first full day in US completed we went to a pub to see NBA game (Spurs vs Memphis, Spurs won, yay!).